The rapid growth of electronic business support tools has increased the efficiency and responsiveness of business both on a local level and globally. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, business automation tools, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, warehouse and inventory management systems, business-to-business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) auctions are all examples of categories of electronic business tools. Hundreds, if not thousands, of implementations of these tools are commercially available along with ‘homegrown’ versions of these and other tools. Message-based systems and queue-based systems, web services, as well as direct feeds, can be used to connect these tools to each other for information sharing and integration of tasks.
The actual integration of these tools can be a significant effort, both in initial setup and in maintenance, as endpoint tools change versions or are replaced. The endpoints for data-based transactions can be internal to an enterprise, such as between a sales order processing system and a manufacturing planning system. Other endpoints can be between internal and external entities, such as a corporate purchasing system and a supplier sales order processing system. The information available to a given system is likely to be well beyond the needs of an individual transaction. For example, the corporate purchasing system is likely to have access to corporate sales information, competitive pricing, supplier contract status, overseas vendors, and more. However, a purchase order sent to the supplier sales order processing system may need little more than a part number, quantity, ship-to address, and volume purchase agreement reference. Care must be taken when developing the interfaces between systems that all the required data and none of the additional data are present when a data-based transaction leaves the sphere of control of the sending system, be it an internal boundary or an inter-enterprise boundary.
XML, or extended markup language, and the associated XSD, or XML schema definition, have brought marked improvements to inter-process collaboration by creating self-defining documents that are not bound to rigorous bit-level formatting conventions. However, XML does little or nothing to prevent transmission of unneeded, unwanted, or privileged information between business data endpoints.